new york, 1984

everything was a conflation of love and mortality, always had been,
always has been how everyone lives,
but we hadn’t expected it like this.
only yesterday we were in love. i had been waiting for the
right look and suddenly he turned into a pile of sparrow bones,
into hunger. i held him so tenderly
you could’ve heard a penny drop. a heart stop. outside
the cars went by on seventh avenue and he
shivered, terrible. his face was hidden in a cocoon of flesh, of purple
marks,
and i wanted to believe that something beautiful would
emerge, but death merely flitted at the
window panes. meanwhile
they called it the gay plague. meanwhile
they wouldn’t even come near us because we were made of
glaciers and icarian destinies. meanwhile larry speakes was too busy
drilling punchlines to care. meanwhile
it was because we loved one another, they said, because
we loved that we died, cupid’s arrow laced with hemlock. meanwhile
they cried innocence in nature’s retribution, and
they shall be crowned in church bells and the autumnal breezes,
amazing grace drifting from funerals, dead bodies in the whispering
pines—
in the inner cities. on the steps of the FDA.
meanwhile men in washington burned our obituaries and rose
triumphal from the ashes drafting laws,
stoning us. meanwhile they condemned us from their handsome pulpits,
but they forgot that
hell was nothing much: a sterilized needle. clean, clean
spaces O great windows and white walls. meanwhile
the cars were going by on seventh avenue.
meanwhile people were dying. meanwhile
we were dying.